His key looked fine. But maybe he had bent it somehow. Or maybe there was something in the lock—though not that he could see. The phone stopped and started again. Whoever was calling didn’t want to use the message machine, meaning that he or she represented exactly the kind of old-school Bad Axer who wanted a human being on the other end, who felt cut off by the loss of the weekly Broadcaster, to whom saying, All the news is online anyway, amounted to saying, You don’t count anymore.

Fanta grumbled around the block toward the alley where the back door was. Lord love a duck, it was hot. Seven A.M. in Wisconsin, and it felt like high noon on Hill 937 in South Vietnam. He rounded the corner, saw that the bank sign read ninety-five degrees, and he snorted. That was only weather. As he had been pointing out in the Broadcaster just two weeks ago, climate was another story: this had become the hottest summer ever, breaking last summer’s record, which had broken the record from the summer before. Cumulatively, the relentless thermal load had settled into the bricks and the concrete and the asphalt, had sunk into the fields and the forests and the spring creeks, and either Fanta was mistaken, or he was seeing rapid changes. Lately, different birds hunted different insects in the Bad Axe, different parasitic vines twined the tree trunks, a bigger and bolder mustelid hunted a more prolific mouse population in his woodpile. Unless Fanta was mistaken, and he was not, he had seen a nutria—sleek Gulf Coast rodent, big as a beaver—ransacking the bank of the Bad Axe River. And the gypsy moths, their incessantly chewing caterpillars the vanguard of an invading horde, shrouding trees everywhere with their sticky gray tents, ominous and funereal… and, goddamn it, Fanta’s key didn’t work in the back door either.

He noticed that the knob and lock were shiny. They were different. They were new.

He labored back to the front door.

Same.

Babette Rickreiner had changed the locks on him, still with his personals inside, his whiskey and cigarettes, music cassette tapes, pictures of his late wife, a hundred years of Bad Axe history in his filing cabinets.

And the phone kept ringing.